AI chatbots are at risk of spreading government restrictions on online
speech, a new study says
[July 16, 2026] By
DIDI TANG
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of President
Donald Trump or Britain's King Charles III, and Anthropic's chatbot
would oblige. Prompted to do the same for Thailand's king, Saudi
Arabia's crown prince or China's leader, and the artificial intelligence
model declined.
It is a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday,
showing that major AI systems, including those built in the U.S., are
more likely to refuse to criticize restrictive leaders or governments.
It raises concerns that the large language models powering chatbots and
AI agents could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over
online speech as the technology is increasingly adopted worldwide.
“There is a real risk that, if model developers do not undertake human
rights due diligence and implement mitigation measures, they will build
AI infrastructure that, intentionally or not, has the effect of
extending illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression globally,”
according to the report from the quasi-independent body.
The findings come as countries are determining how to put up guardrails
around AI without impeding their ability to compete in the rapidly
developing field. That includes a Trump administration oversight effort
related to the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems.
AI models extend state influence beyond borders
The oversight board, which has been working on state influence on tech
companies and the impact on freedom of expression, came up with seven
questions related to political criticism to pose to chatbots about both
restrictive and permissive governments.
The study picked 10 commercial large language models by top tech
companies — including Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI — and asked the AI
systems to make critical pamphlets, write limericks, give reasons if
someone should join protests, and more.
“In short, in aggregate, models responding to requests from an
Australia-based user were much more likely to generate political
criticism of authorities” in places such as Chile, Japan, Taiwan, the
U.K. and the U.S. “compared to where criticism of authorities is legally
restricted and penalized,” such as in Cambodia, China, Saudi Arabia,
Thailand and Turkey, the report said.
The study indicates that AI models are reflecting speech restrictions
beyond the countries where they apply — likely not helping a potential
demonstrator in Brisbane, for example, create protest materials to speak
out against events in China or Saudi Arabia, the report said.
“Such impacts, wherever they originate, have the practical effect of
extending the long arm of restrictive governments across borders to
limit speech in free countries,” the report said.
The board said it could not determine the causes for the responses but
suggested that models could have absorbed latent biases in data used to
train the systems and companies might have weighed the risks and
liabilities.
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The Chat GPT app icon is seen on a smartphone screen, Aug. 4,
2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)
 Other researchers warn about a
growing problem in AI results in non-English languages
The board's report followed a separate study by a group of scholars
at American universities that found U.S.-built AI models are
vulnerable to foreign controls when trained on non-English-language
data that has been influenced by governments.
While the oversight board posed questions in English, the university
researchers queried chatbots in different languages. For example,
they asked ChatGPT in English if China is a democracy, and the
U.S.-developed chatbot said it’s not generally considered one. Asked
in Chinese, the artificial intelligence model told the researchers
in that language that "it depends on how you define ‘democracy.’”
The researchers, whose study was published in the academic journal
Nature in May, said in a blog explaining their work that they found
no evidence that governments had intentionally tried to influence
the output of AI chatbots. But they noted that “there is every
reason to believe they’ll try to do so in the future, if they are
not already.”
“People often talk about AI as if it learns from the internet in
some neutral way. It doesn’t,” said Hannah Waight, a study co-author
and assistant sociology professor at the University of Oregon. “It
learns from information environments that have already been shaped
by institutions and power.”
No easy solution to how data is being fed to AI models
Carlos Carrasco-Farré, who specializes in machine learning, AI,
misinformation, social media and human-machine interactions at Esade
Business School in Barcelona, said that “AI systems inherit not only
biases contained within individual documents but also inequalities
in who has the power to produce and suppress information at scale.”
There is no easy solution, though developers could assess the data
to avoid treating thousands of copies of the same state narrative as
if they are thousands of independent voices as well as run
multilingual audits, said Carrasco-Farré, who was not part of either
study.
Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI responded to requests for comment on
the researchers' study published in May.
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